The Wombats are hitting a soft experimental stride with Oh! The Ocean releases. Second single Blood on the Hospital Floor promises the same indie stylings with adjacent flourishes and delivers well enough. Those rose-tinted reflections work a little better when the best songs of your discography are less than a decade old. But The Wombats are on a reinventive path, a restructuring of their sound and style while containing themselves in the comfortable grooves of the genre. Slick guitar work and a push for their comfortable and enjoyably light style can be found here, a real contrast to lead single, Sorry I’m Late, I Didn’t Want to Come. Their introverted perspective on the world is still there, locked in place and now built around Blood on the Hospital Floor.
Erratic decisions and a moodiness which sways with the same suddenness of weather changes all mark nice lyrical moments from Matthew Murphy on a track with such a thrilling, upbeat tempo. There may not be all too much depth to it and the repeat listens offer nothing but instrumental trickery and moments of interest, but Blood on the Hospital Floor is fun. Constraints of experimental choices on lead single Sorry I’m Late are thrown aside for a more traditional sound and a style more fitting to The Wombats’ earlier works. Those who like this change can be assured by the consistency but for those who dared to dream of how The Wombats could evolve their sound after a near two decades of maintaining the polish, tough luck. Neat playlist filler for those needing it, an immediately catchy piece which is more a credit to the instrumental prowess of the band than the writing found within.
Yet for all those slightly forgettable tinges there is an urgency to Blood on the Hospital Floor, a sense of pumped-up dance fever to it which The Wombats has always been so consistent in making. Guitar music is not so much back as it is revised once more, dragging itself back to the mid-2010s when this sort of sound would guarantee a chart-topping time. Blood on the Hospital Floor is ironic in its rose-tinted view of the past because it changes very little about what The Wombats have done for some time. But is there any issue with maintaining this tone amid a mix of experimental offerings elsewhere? Not really, no. Artists should never strive for harmless works and at the very least, Murphy has included some soft blows within.
Pulling the rest of those punches is where Blood on the Hospital Floor collapses. That fine line between a defiant indie track and plodding instrumental indifference is toed well by The Wombats on this one. Light and loose music from the band and yet a refreshing bit of fun. Harmless despite its desire to be more than that, with its loved-up wordplay and slick interactions forming the bed of a song biting off more than it can chew. Choking on ambition is a far greater fate than strumming along to a perfectly reasonable, facile song. Blood on the Hospital Floor manages to blur the charms of the band’s earliest works, the punchiness of their proud guitar style with a sense of adventure, however vague, that some bands of their longevity have done away with entirely.
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